AV equipment is required to deliver not only high-quality video but also high-quality audio. In view of this, a wide variety of audio coding methods are employed nowadays. For example, BD (Blue-ray Disc) realizes playback of audio that is suitable for performance capabilities and usable languages of each playback device, by recording a plurality of audio streams (32 at the maximum) of different coding methods and languages onto a recording medium.
In conventional viewing environments, audio stream selection is mainly performed whereby a player equipped with a decoder reads streams from a recording medium and selects an audio stream that suits the decoder.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H09-282848